Boston-based insurtech start-up FilingMate first caught our eye when it was one of the featured start-up stories at the last Insurtech Boston Event. After making contact to learn more about Filing Mate and its value proposition for the insurance industry, both in Massachusetts and beyond, Agency Checklists immediately knew this is a company that many of our readers should know about.
As anyone who has dealt with U.S. insurance regulatory filings know, it is often a complicated and labor-intensive process. Through harnessing the power of the cloud and big data, FilingMate offers an uncomplicated, efficient and effective way for carriers, MGAs or TPAs to handle all of the regulatory filings across the country.
So, without further ado, let us introduce you to FilingMate…
What is FilingMate and what problem is it trying to solve in insurance?
Insurance is one of the most highly regulated industries and various regulators – state departments of insurance, state departments of revenue, the NAIC, various local boards, bureaus, fair plans and so forth – have a mandate to understand and allow various insurance products in their jurisdictions. To do their jobs, regulators issue requests for information to insurance companies. Some requests are recurring, others are one time, others are periodic or ad hoc. [pullquote]We like to think of it a little like “TurboTax” for insurance companies.[/pullquote]
FilingMate is a platform for these compliance related activities, helping insurance companies understand what data must be submitted, to which regulator, at what time, and understand who within the company is doing the work and where they are in their process. We like to think of it a little like “TurboTax” for insurance companies.
Where did the inspiration to start FilingMate come from?
My co-founder, Maureen Fidler, and I worked for a large personal lines carrier. She was the primary contact for legal and compliance matters, I was the representative for the finance department. We had a very well worn path between our desks gathering information and signatures for regular filings like annual statements and countless special projects such as license expansions, redomestications, new products, geographic expansions, and mergers. We knew that Excel, a shared drive, and inter-office mail were not the solution and that there had to be a better way. When we couldn’t find one, it drove us to create FilingMate.
Could you tell us a little bit about your background? Did you work in the insurance industry prior to starting FilingMate?
So my background really is in public accounting. I started with one of the big four accounting firms (Ernest & Young) where I spent six or seven years, mainly focused on M&A work. While working there I got to see a lot of different companies and work with lots of different management teams.
After getting a lot of calls at midnight from private equity clients, I decided I wanted to be on the other end of the phone call. So I joined a private equity firm, actually here in Boston, a company called Great Hill Partners. They have done a number of investments in financial services, though not specifically focused on insurance, but it gave me a background of sorts, in how investors look at businesses, what businesses are successful, what businesses may be a little bit more challenged from a business model perspective. After working there, I thought that I could apply all of that knowledge to actually working in the operations of a company.
As I went out and started looking at opportunities, the one that caught my eye was with an insurance company. This was not what I expected…but I really liked the business model that this particular company (direct to consumer, channel-partner focused strategy) and it had many aspects of the consumer facing services companies that I had worked with in the past. They were also contemplating a potential transaction, which made it an exciting opportunity to learn a new industry while helping them position for a sale to a larger organization or potentially go public.[pullquote]We had a very well worn path between our desks gathering information and signatures for regular filings …We knew that Excel, a shared drive, and inter-office mail were not the solution and that there had to be a better way.”[/pullquote]
It was a great experience and I ended up being there for about three years before the transaction and then another year after the transaction to help with sort of integration activities and so forth. During that process of working at the insurance company, I got to see a lot different pieces of insurance, from the buying of our corporate insurance and reinsurance programs to some re-domestications and a license expansion across the country and so forth. So many different transactions that involved regulators, in addition to, just sort of the ordinary market conduct exams and financial exams and so forth, that are going on all the time at an insurance company.
Managing those processes was very manual. It required a lot of paperwork being shipped around inside our company, shared drives as well. They were trying to share information electronically, sending emails and so forth. It was extremely difficult to track. And I had the opportunity to meet my future FilingMate co-founder, who had been working in various compliance roles for over 20 years.
We were spending so much time walking back and forth between our desks and we figured there was some platform out there that had been developed to make this process easier. And when we couldn’t find it, we decided we would do it ourselves. So that was kind of the journey through four years of at a carrier realizing that there are these very manual processes that are in place and the realization that we could do something about it with software and with the technology that is available in the industry these days.
Could you tell us which insurance company you were working at and your position there?
I was the Director of Finance at Homesite, which was acquired by American Family during my time there.
So were you responsible for some of the filings an insurance company must submit, annual and quarterly reports and the like?
It is a group effort to do all of these things. But yes, I was involved in the preparation of yellow books, annual/quarterly statement filings, UCAA (uniform Certificate of Authority Application), “FAIR Plan” reporting and some tax-related reports and calculations. If it involved a number from finance, I was frequently one of the people involved.
And what about the insurance background of your co-founder, Maureen Fidler?
She started out her insurance career at Plymouth Rock in accounting and finance and attended law school while working there. After that, she joined Homesite as one of its early employees. So she has this background that is really attractive for compliance professionals, of understanding the numbers, understanding the laws and how they work. Her background and experience ends up being sort of a great fit for compliance related activities.
Turning back to FilingMate, has it officially launched or is it still in Beta? Are you live in all 50 states?
We publicly announced the product in November 2017 and went live with our first customer in early 2018. As of March 1st of this year, our software was utilized in the generation of forms and filings in all 50 states (plus Washington DC). Our first customer was an insurance carrier, but we’re receiving lots of interest from MGAs and TPAs and expect to be able to support them in their filing efforts in the near future.
What forms is FilingMate presently set up to handle?
We were very deliberate in the filing type that we supported initially. We picked a relatively small set of forms, about 300-350 specifically, which contain relatively benign types of data and where the contents of the forms are already public or become public very shortly after submission. This allowed us to avoid super confidential business plans or expansion plans in our initial module, but still prove the functionality of the system.
So, this subset of forms supports the annual statement submission with state-specific forms including publication requirements, recording the contact information for regulators to reach the right person at a company in the case of a catastrophe, or similar demographic information submissions.
We are now getting into license expansion, some of the UCAA form applications and related documents with our second project. And that information does require some additional security.
How do you protect your clients data?
Security is increasingly critical in our business, however, we were fortunate to have identified a couple of filings where the data is not particularly sensitive or confidential – an insurance company’s address as an example – or where data becomes publicly available in a very short amount of time. This allowed us to initially focus on product functionality rather than on building out a massive security infrastructure.
As we add additional types of filings which contain more sensitive data, we are scaling our security infrastructure accordingly.
What type of technology does FilingMate use?
It is all hosted on Microsoft Azure, which is Microsoft’s version of Amazon AWS. It is built with enterprise level technologies, mainly microsoft.net and angular, which are the biggest languages that we are using.
So does that mean it is basically in the cloud and can be accessed by your various company clients?
Exactly. It is a multi-tenant SaaS application. This means that as soon as we release a new form, or filing, or regulator, it is immediately available to all of our clients. Data is secured at a company level so that an individual company’s data remains secure and is accessible only to its own authorized users.
How big is FilingMate right now? Where is it located?
We’re based in Somerville, Massachusetts as a team of 3 right now. We expect to grow pretty significantly through 2018.
How is the company financed?
Maureen and I have financed the growth of FilingMate to date. We don’t have any outside investors at this time.
How exactly does FilingMate work, can you walk us through it?
There are four major functions that FilingMate helps to automate: (1) finding relevant forms and prefilling data, (2) managing the collection data (including signatures) from various departments, (3) submitting data to regulators, and (4) tracking what has been sent to regulators. [pullquote]There are four major functions that FilingMate helps to automate: (1) finding relevant forms and prefilling data, (2) managing the collection data (including signatures) from various departments, (3) submitting data to regulators, and (4) tracking what has been sent to regulators[/pullquote]
FilingMate has a large library of forms and filings tagged with various characteristics which can then be mashed up with characteristics of an insurance carrier such as licenses, lines of business, size, etc. From there, we ask specific questions which further refine the universe of forms and filings to just the ones most relevant to the carrier.
Where data is available, FilingMate prepopulates fields with that data and then manages the gathering of data from various individuals or departments around the insurance company. Once ready for review, we can gather e-signatures (where accepted) from executives and populate those on forms before submitting them to regulators.
And, when similar filings are required in the future, FilingMate will present prior responses to further speed the regulatory compliance process.
How does FilingMate use technology to ease the regulatory filing process?
We like to say that the “paper form” was one of the first APIs – it was a medium for two independent parties to exchange information. It just wasn’t particularly good – instructions weren’t clear, data was a pain to enter, and, on the back end, it was hard to pull the data back out again.
We utilize technology to really create a collaborative platform for compliance where many people can leverage prepopulated data and work together to complete filings efficiently and effectively. FilingMate is hosted in the cloud so as soon as we release a new form or support a new regulator, it’s instantly available to all our clients.
How were you able to compile a forms library so to speak? How long did that take to put together?
We can upload, review, map and publish a form to our users in just a few minutes. Uploading information in bulk and utilizing powerful tools to handle new types of forms and filings is something we’re continuing to improve.
Do you have any sort of on-boarding procedures for a company when they become a client?
When we sign up a user we spend a little bit of time with folks at the company to make sure that we have some basic demographic information about the company and we’ve got it accurately reflected in our system. So we confirm things like the exact legal name of the company, the various addresses that maybe appropriate because books and records may be in a different location than the claims office or the administrative offices of the company, and identifying the key individuals by role at a company.
We also use this initial meeting as an opportunity to understand as well the relationship between different entities at a carrier. Frequently, insurance companies are not one company like we think of. They may actually be a group of three, four, five, ten different companies. So just understanding a little bit more about how those different entities operate together, who the officers are for each, and contacts are for various forms that may ultimately need to be completed or signed by the company through the ordinary course of business.
At that point, we establish a primary user – sort of the company’s “super user”. That person can assign an unlimited number of user ID’s to different people at the company or even outside parties who are responsible for completing certain activities. We can further provisioned access at an operating company level, so if an insurance company operating in Massachusetts and in Vermont only wants certain people to access the Massachusetts data and not Vermont data, we can set that up as well.
How do you filter out what forms are needed for each client?
We employ a multi-pronged approach in identifying forms required for each client. It starts with a detailed understanding of the client – what type of company are they, what and where do they write, what are the characteristics of their licenses, what is the key demographic information of the company, etc. This eliminates the majority of forms which simply don’t apply. The second step are filing or time-specific questions where we may not have advance knowledge and need someone from the client to provide some supplemental information.
With these two pieces of information, we’re about 98% of the way there. But, to capture the final 2%, we’ve built in flexibility to allow for company-specific use cases which may have been negotiated between the company and the regulator and which may differ from the written rules and regulator instructions.
What has been the biggest challenge in starting FilingMate?
As with many technology platforms, there is a give and take around flexibility. We constantly have to ask ourselves,”Is this an area where we should lock down available options or allow for flexibility?” By way of example, some carriers seem to complete their filings by state while others may complete work on a subsidiary by subsidiary basis. Ultimately in this instance, we allowed for either but it is always a trade off.
How do you keep on top of the regulatory rules in each of the 50 states?
Carriers have in-house teams reviewing various regulations and trying to stay up to date with filing requirements and various forms. The opportunity for FilingMate is pulling all that duplication of work into one spot and leveraging it for the betterment of the whole industry.
So, we do many of the same activities that carriers do – subscribing to various feeds of updates, querying regulator websites, and so forth. We also have the advantage of learning from multiple clients – if one client learns something, we’re able to quickly incorporate that for the betterment of all our other clients.
Who or what type of customer would most benefit from using FilingMate?
We’ve identified two different use cases for our software: (1) insurance companies – carriers, MGAs, TPAs, or similar – looking to expand quickly with new licenses or lines of business and (2) insurance companies sick of the grind of filling out forms and manually tracking the status of filings. The former are looking to complete specific types of paperwork which they don’t commonly complete, as fast as possible. The latter have a higher percentage of routine filings but are looking to complete this work more efficiently and effectively.
What are you goals for the company in 2018?
Over the next year or so, we plan to sign up a few additional partners to really work closely with as we build out our platform for additional use cases, filing types, regulators, and types of insurance companies (carriers, MGAs, TPAs, etc). Our team will grow to support the additional customer base.
Anything else we missed that our readers should know about FilingMate?
Our focus is helping insurance companies complete regulatory compliance activities in a more effective and efficient way, and it is a huge opportunity. But, there is a similar opportunity for regulators too. As much as a carrier hates sending lots of faxes, it is easy to imagine that a regulator hates receiving faxes and keying that data into spreadsheets. From our perspective, it is as easy to send a spreadsheet or post data via an API as it is to send a fax. So, we are excited to see interest in compliance process improvements at the NAIC and with various state regulatory bodies.
How can interested individuals get in touch with FilingMate?
I’d love to speak with folks involved in or interested in regulatory compliance – especially folks at carriers, MGAs or TPAs who are overwhelmed with regulatory compliance activities. Feel free to drop me a note directly at scott@filingmate.com.
